Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  “Je suis un écrivain,” I said, suddenly feeling very pompous. When speaking in English, if you say that you are a writer people tend to look at you fondly, and then they’ll tell you exactly what they wanted to be when they were little—a fireman, a bunny doctor, a Power Ranger—before they grew up and became responsible adults. From then on, whenever they introduce you to others, their eyes get a little misty when they mention, with a conspiratorial wink, He’s a writer, as if they were announcing the discovery of the neighborhood hobbit. Or they look at you blankly, waiting for you to finish the sentence: “I mean, that’s what I do in between shifts at Denny’s.”

  Say that you are a writer in French, however, and people just assume that you’ve already won the Nobel Prize in Literature—twice. You are immediately regarded as some kind of formidable intellectual in possession of a golden tongue and a devastating wit. You may look like an unwashed, overweight accountant in desperate need of a haircut, but you will now be regarded as roguishly sexy. How else to explain the existence of Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous writer, a comically affected old geezer who traipses around the world in immaculate white shirts that he wears unbuttoned to the navel as he defends the privileged male’s droit de seigneur? This would never happen in America, where writers are regarded as affectionate pets, whimsical Peter Pans always two steps removed from adulthood, until they become bitter and old and take up tenure in the nation’s college English departments. It’s no wonder, really, that so many American writers speak so fondly of France. All you have to say is je suis un écrivain and people stand up as if in the presence of greatness.

  Which is exactly what this television crew now did as they shuffled to their feet. They appeared to be under the assumption that I lived in Los Angeles, possibly because they had seen me running, which is something only vain, body-conscious people did, ergo L.A. Also, the on-screen talent and I wore the exact same kind of sunglasses, which made this a perceptive assumption, since I did indeed buy my shades at the duty-free in LAX, shortly after I’d slapped my forehead with a big d’oh when I’d realized I’d forgotten to pack a pair. It hadn’t occurred to me that in the depths of an East Coast winter that it might be sunny in the South Pacific. Naturally, they put two and two together—writer plus Los Angeles equals screenwriter—and they asked me what films I’d written. Tempted as I was to take credit for Gigli, I explained that I was just a regular old writer, the kind who calls a tweet a good, productive day.

  “Ah,” the cameraman said. “Comme Hemingway ou Hunter Thompson?”

  Do you see what I mean? Immediately, there is this presumption that because you are un écrivain you are comparable to two of the titans of twentieth-century American literature. Words again failed me as I searched for the French equivalent of hack, so I described myself as a travel writer, which is pretty much the same thing. Immediately, they wanted to know what I thought of the Marquesas.

  How to explain the magnificence of the islands? How to convey the majesty, the ethereal beauty, the haunting history of the Marquesas? I thought for a moment. “C’est très . . . jolie.”

  Yes, they agreed. It is very pretty. And we stood there for a long moment soaking in all this prettiness. But why, the on-screen talent wanted to know as he took a deep drag off a cigarette, did I decide to run up that monstrous hill. Oh, I don’t know, I thought. Maybe because I don’t want to end my days fellating a shotgun like those pill-popping alcoholics Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson. But this seemed too complicated for me to express in French. I filched a cigarette and thought of what Papa might have said.

  “Because,” I said in French, exhaling a plume of smoke, “it was there.” And then I turned my gaze to the mountains, to my conquest, squinting with grim delight. I had triumphed over Nature’s cruelties. I was a Man. And I was un écrivain. The world submits before me.

  They nodded reverentially at the deep sagacity of it all, and I thought, you know, I really need to move to France. I could get used to this.

  Chapter Eight

  I wasn’t feeling particularly happy with this smoking business, however. I knew, of course, that there is a strong correlation between nicotine addiction and alcoholism. Almost no one in the developed world smokes anymore except for the lushes. Eighty percent of all alkies smoke. As for the other 20 percent—the health-conscious drunks and pill poppers who only eat organic foods and manage to stay the onset of the inevitable booze gut through a rigorous devotion to Pilates and daily runs as they shovel fistfuls of Vicodin down their gullets followed by three bottles of red wine (red because it’s heart smart)? They pick up smoking once they get to rehab.

  It’s true. At my particular institution of choice, we were allowed just one phone call a week. No Internet. No e-mail. Just one call. The first words out of my mouth were Send a carton of smokes now. They say that for the alcoholic giving up the drink, a yawning void suddenly opens up and it needs to be filled pronto. In rehab, it’s filled with nicotine. This is a dumb thing to do, of course, but people going through withdrawal aren’t exactly feeling like the sharpest tools in the shed. Conventional wisdom says that you should only deal with one addiction at a time. This, of course, is the equivalent of telling an alcoholic that now would be a good time to take up a two-pack-a-day habit, maybe hit the casinos in Atlantic City, and develop a nice little sugar addiction. Science, however, tells us that it’s best to dispense with all the vices at the same time. If you’re going to suffer, might as well be efficient about it. Neurological tests done six months after treatment show that alcoholics who also refrained from smoking demonstrated far higher rates of brain repair than those who continued to smoke. So I’d quit again not long after I was discharged and assumed a health-conscious lifestyle. If life was going to suck for a while, best to get it done and over with.

  And so I felt guilty as I danced with the nicotine devil again. I was the worst kind of smoker now—the moocher, the sort of person that refused to buy a pack of their own, thinking that it didn’t really count as long as I refrained from purchasing smokes myself. But smoking here satisfied some primal impulse. It was illicit, which in my way of thinking equated something good. It felt foolish and reckless—also a plus in my book. And it replicated what drinking did for me at the end—a brief rush, followed by dizziness, nausea, a skull-shattering headache, and waves of remorse. It was a perfect substitute. And, I reasoned, of the two addictions nicotine was far preferable to alcohol. Both will kill you, but only alcohol will turn you into a self-absorbed asshole.

  If there is one island where we can do a little compare-and-contrast of the two addictions it is Hiva Oa. There are two celebrities buried in the Calvary Cemetery in Atuona, a surprisingly substantial town of 1,500 (a lot for the Marquesas) that lies in the shadow of a 4,000-foot eminence called Mount Temetiu, a striking prominence with a steep, verdant crest around which, on an otherwise sunny day, a swirl of puffy white clouds elicited a dramatic windswept plume, as if God’s hair dryer was now focused on its slopes. It was here that Jacques Brel lived his remaining years.

  You know, of course, who Jacques Brel is, right? Neither did I. But he is, apparently, a legend in the francophone world. If I were to summarize, I’d call him the male Edith Piaf, a singer of chansons about loss, obsession, death, and all sorts of other cheery subjects. He was Belgian, so maybe that explains it. Have you ever met a happy Belgian? Exactly. But Brel was wildly successful, selling a gazillion albums and appearing in more than ten films in the fifties and sixties. And then he learned that he had a tumor on his lung. So what did he do? He bought a sixty-foot ketch and sailed off to the South Pacific.

  I liked him immediately. When confronted with death, do you look it in the eye? No, you run away. He had planned on a three-month circumnavigation of the world, but perhaps summoning the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson, he elected to stay in the South Seas, and after a fifty-nine-day sail across the Pacific he found himself on Hiva Oa, which he would come t
o know as home. But why this island?

  Legend has it that upon arrival, Brel encountered a few teenage boys strumming a guitar. Casually mentioning that from time to time he liked to carry a tune as well, the boys lent him their instrument, whereupon he sang a couple of his hits in his deep, lugubrious voice. When he finished, the boys regarded him silently, and then informed him that he can’t sing worth merde, and proceeded to demonstrate what a good Marquesan song sounded like. Brel enjoyed the response so much, and the implied promise of anonymity, that he elected to stay.

  He took to a modest cottage in the hills above town and proceeded to pursue all sorts of ennobling endeavors. He built the first cinema in the Marquesas. He took up flying, soon buying a plane of his own, which he called Jojo, and used it as an air ambulance, ferrying the sick and the wounded to distant Papeete. Today, you can find Jacques Brel’s plane, a Beechcraft D50C Twin Bonanza, in a small museum in Atuona, a lovingly crafted space devoted to his memory. It reminded me of one of those small-town museums that display an assortment of curios and artifacts, all gathered by townsfolk with a great affection for the place and a determination that no one forget their little corner of earth. Jacques Brel was not long for this world, alas. He died of lung cancer at the age of forty-nine, and now lies in a simple, well-tended grave, surrounded by flowers and ferns, and stacks of stones where visitors deposit their prayers and remembrances. He was a smoker, obviously, but more importantly he was a good, noble, altruistic person, so score one for the smokers.

  Now let’s consider the active alcoholic/addict. A few yards from Brel’s final resting place lies another grave. It’s unusual in that above it, on the hillside, are acres of white crosses, the tombs of priests and nuns and devoted Catholics, whereas this one is made of red volcanic rocks, and instead of a cross or headstone, it is lorded over by a statue of a wild man, a paean to La Vie Sauvage. At its base is a simple, white, hand-painted inscription—PAUL GAUGUIN 1903.

  As I stood before it, I found myself next to Mareile. Many of the passengers had elected to board a bus for the short journey from the pier to the cemetery, and we had walked together, stopping first at a black sand beach, and departing moments later after we were enveloped in a blizzard of no-nos, which are the planet’s most irritating insects, and reason enough to bring back DDT (I jest. Mostly). As we’d walked, we’d discussed Gauguin. Yes, he made nice pictures, and, yes, his impact upon the art world was enormously influential, but I was more interested in the man himself. As we approached his grave, I asked Mareile about what was known about Gauguin’s vices—what did he consume and how much? This was the sort of minutia I was interested in.

  “In 2003,” she said, “we excavated a pit next to his home, where we found bottles of wine, absinthe, and morphine. Matching it to store records, we estimated that on a typical day, Gauguin drank a bottle of wine, a few draughts of absinthe, followed by some morphine. So you see, it wasn’t so much.”

  So scratch moving back to Europe. Obviously, I can’t live there again. In much of Europe you’re not considered an alcoholic until you wake up underneath a highway overpass and begin your morning with a shot of antifreeze and a gulp of perfume, followed by a lunch of vanilla extract and a pint of mouthwash, and then you tumble through the remainder of your day, waving at your neighbors who merely regard you as a devilish bon vivant. Knowing a little something about how an alcoholic operates and the extraordinary acts of subterfuge involved in covering one’s tracks, I suspected that Gauguin imbibed a trifle more than that—you need only read his writing to realize that he was a seriously fucked-up individual—but let’s say for the sake of argument that a bottle of wine, an unknown amount of absinthe, and a few shots of morphine constituted his daily intake. It would kill a normal man.

  Let’s ignore the wine altogether. Thomas Jefferson drank a bottle a day. Lots of people do. If I’d been able to maintain that level of drinking, it’s unlikely that I would have ever given it up. But absinthe? The old-school 150-proof green nectar, the spirit known for its hallucinogenic qualities, the firewater that by 1915 was banned throughout Europe and the United States? Mixed with morphine, the most powerful opiate ever created? That shit will mess you up. In fact, the two sedatives will conspire with your brain and tell it, hey, let’s not bother with this breathing business. Let’s just . . . drift off. Did you get that, kids? Do not mix opiates with alcohol. You’ll pass out and the next thing you know you’re face-to-face with Ganesh.

  Obviously, it takes years to acquire that kind of tolerance. If you do a trajectory of Gauguin’s life, you can match the progression of the disease with the ever-flourishing degree of asshole-dom that he exhibited. Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin moved to Peru as a wee lad, getting an early jump on the itinerant life that he would pursue until his death. He returned to France, spent some time in the navy and the merchant marine, and began a career as a stockbroker. He’d married and soon found himself the proud papa of five children. Paul Gauguin, at this moment in time, is Mr. Bourgeois himself. And then he took up painting.

  It is here where your opinion of him all comes down to your perception, your disposition, your values. For many, this is all that matters: A gifted man found his calling and in the years to come filled canvas after canvas with brilliant, inspired strokes, enriching the cultural heritage of the world. Let the art speak for itself, most will say. The foibles and personal failures of the artist have no relevance. Art for art’s sake.

  Then there are the romanticists, the ones who see in Gauguin a noble, burning vision, a brave willingness to unshackle himself from the pedestrian, suffocating mores of the day, the savage aflame with the pursuit of art. Gauguin abandoned his family in Denmark, where he’d gone to pursue a business that went sour. No matter, the dream beckoned and he wandered first to Brittany and then Provence, where he spent his time painting, carousing, acquiring syphilis, and hanging out with Vincent van Gogh, who had two ears at the start of their friendship, but just one at the end. Make of that what you will. But here Gauguin acquired his extraordinary palette of colors, the breakthrough style that somehow took the best of impressionism, symbolism, and naturalism, and created a new visual language, one that spoke to Cézanne and Matisse and Picasso and generations of artists to follow. He yearned for simplicity, the primal, the savage, and in its pursuit he moved onward to Martinique, to Tahiti, and finally to the Marquesas, to Hiva Oa, where he died in penury, because our silly, narrow-minded world could not fathom his brilliance. He was dazzling, misunderstood, and an inspiration for those willing to sacrifice everything for the immortality of beauty.

  Or you could put on your schoolmarm’s glasses and simply regard Paul Gauguin as an alcoholic/addict doing what is called the geographic, the ceaseless moving to escape his own asshole self. I know: Pot meet kettle. I have considerable expertise in asshole-dom, it’s true. I know of what I speak. Leave the kids at home alone late at night as I go out and search for one more bottle. Passing out midday and forgetting to pick up these very same children from school. The endless lies. The going off on weekends so I could quote work unquote and drink myself into oblivion. And these are the people I love more dearly than life itself, and yet, in the throes of addiction, that was what I was reduced to—an asshole. It’s why in meetings, I think we need to change our standard greeting. It should be: Hi, I’m Maarten. And I’m an assoholic. The recent advances in the neuroscience of addiction are all well and good, but for the afflicted, in order to move on, it’s best to acknowledge what, exactly, we truly are when we imbibe—incorrigible assholes.

  Which is why Paul Gauguin interests me so much. It’s not his paintings, wood carvings, and sculptures, though I do admire them and think they rightfully belong in the pantheon of the greats. No, what rings my bell is the sheer depravity of his asshole-ness. We don’t even need to look to outside sources for confirmation of his loathsomeness. Just pick up Noa Noa, his little book about his time in Tahiti. Right there on page fourteen, after encou
ntering “young women and young girls, tranquil of eye, pure Tahitians,” he goes on to describe their inner lives: “All, indeed, wish to be taken, literally, brutally taken without a single word. All have the secret desire for violence.” In this way, he continues, “she has not given her consent for the beginning of a permanent love . . . it has a savage sort of charm.”

  Now, I grant you, I never read Fifty Shades of Grey, so what do I know? But I’m going to guess that being mauled by a goateed, pot-bellied Frenchman with a Pinocchio nose, reeking of liquor and with the dead-eyed stare of the morphine-addict, probably doesn’t figure very prominently in the fantasy lives of women, young or old, islander or continental. But Gauguin wasn’t really interested in grown women. He was a pedophile, a syphilitic sexual tourist who in between painting and getting plastered abused girls and young women by the score, leaving a trail of infections and unwanted children in his wake. He claimed to yearn for freedom from civilization and artifice, to live unmoored by rules and custom, so that he could pursue a higher, truer existence, the life of the savage, a term he fetishized. It was his reasoning, his justification for the life that he led, which was sordid and unhappy. Reading Noa Noa is like reading the mawkish notes of the criminal rationalizing the crime. Tahiti left him “brutally disappointed.” It was too civilized for him, and he departed for farther shores, to Hiva Oa. He too has a museum here, and you could tell right away that it was an official, government-sanctioned kind of Cultural Center with sterile videologues, sanctimonious descriptions about his life and work, and a re-creation of his Maison du Jouir, or House of Pleasure, complete with a fishing pole dangling from the second-story open window, which Gauguin used to fetch his bottles from his well. This, I think, was meant to convey something charming and rascally about Gauguin. Of course, what I saw was the ingenious solution to that most intractable of problems confronting the addict/alcoholic—stairs. They are a fucking nightmare when you’re fucked-up. You think it’s a coincidence that most of us end up in a double-wide trailer instead of a fifth-floor walk-up? No, that’s what passes for forethought among junkies and drunks.